I bought a refurbished iPad Air from the Apple store a few months ago because I was going a bit crazy being away from my computer whilst my kitchen was being done up for the last 6 months 1. I thought it would also be useful for writing, video and photography 2.
I chose the iPad Air (4th generation) because it seemed like it had all the features I wanted and a decent chip to run the painting and sculpting apps. I got an Apple Pencil (2nd generation) to go with it.
I’ve tried out several apps so far for digital painting and 3D sculpting but these are the main ones I’ve settled on using for the time being. I have tried some others but I’ll leave them for another time.
Digital Painting
Procreate
It hasn’t escaped my attention that Procreate has been around for a while and is one of the most popular apps for digital art on the iPad. Because of that it was the first one I decided to buy from the app store, although I did try a few free painting apps as well. I think it has a nice simple minimalistic UI but I’m still not used to using touch screen gestures, I’m sure that will improve over time as I use it more. I disabled the painting with touch on mine because it was annoying when I accidently touched the screen with my hand, I prefer drawing with an Apple Pencil.
The icons along the top of the program give access to more options. I don’t really want to write too much about this in this article especially as I have not used this software much yet, but the ones on the top right are for access to the brush library, smudge tool brush selection, eraser tool brush selection, layers and colour selection.
Personally I prefer working on a desktop PC3 but it is great to have the option to sketch digitally anywhere I want with the iPad. I will probably use it to do sketches and then take them to the PC to finish them. The camera is also very handy if I need reference. I was initially thinking of using it do observation studies as I can’t very well carry around my desktop PC with me now can I?. My mum has also decided to get an iPad and use it for drawing embroidery designs in Procreate. It was somewhat of a revelation to her that she could use brushes that look like embroidery stitches.
I tried the 3D painting feature but I wasn’t that impressed by it over using something like 3D Coat, Substance Painter or Blender. It feels like a gimmick.
The brushes are pretty good out of the box with this program and it supports import of Photoshop brushes so one of the first things I did was import my set of custom Photoshop brushes and tweak them to work better in Procreate. The Procreate brushes are now available included with the Photoshop set I made. They are on Gumroad if anyone wants to try them for $1.
Lots of brush packs and tutorials are available from different creators on the internet which is probably a good reason most people use this app. The presentation and marketing of Procreate is very good and I like their Stance we have.
As for the default brushes here are some of the ones I liked:
I found that turning the stabilization feature off on some of the brushes in the Caligraphy section improved the feel of them for painting as I like to have control of my strokes and I often like to make fast strokes 4. The stabilization often makes it feel like someone is holding my hand back as I try to draw, but it is useful if you need to make longer more controlled strokes as is often the case with caligraphy. I feel like it is keeping the training wheels on personally.
Art Set 4
Art Set 4 comes as a free version with a pay to upgrade to the full features option. Initially I tried the free version and really loved the way the oil paints and coloured pencils worked in this app with the Apple Pencil. It has a very good brush engine for more traditional / realistic type painting than Procreate does. I liked it so much that I decided to upgrade to the full version of it so I could use more of the editing tools and all of the brushes.
The Apple Pencil has a better range of tilt control than my Huion Kamvas 22 Plus which helps a lot with the feel of drawing naturally with pencils usually only possible when drawing traditionally. I have heard there are options to link iPads with desktop apps so perhaps that could be something to look into one day.
I dragged my favourite brushes to the top of the brush selection menu after trying them all.
The UI is very minimal upon opening a new file but it can be customised by dragging icons to the sides of the application.
I will probably use Art Set 4 as a digital mixed medium sketchbook.
Drawing
Amaziograph
I’ve wanted to try Amaziograph for years but couldn’t until now. This is probably my favourite app so far on the iPad because I think it is very relaxing and fun making kaleidoscopic and tessellating patterns. I have not found a software on the desktop (yet) that is as fun to use as this app for these sort of images.
It has some good features including the usual in most drawing and painting softwares such as chosing a variety of image size presets to work in, layers, basic brush editing features (very basic in this program compared to others though), eraser, fill tool, color selection, brush size and brush opacity, undo and redo.
The main perk of this app over others I’ve tried is the symmetry, tessellation and kaleidoscope pattern creation tools, the actual drawing tools are very basic but do the job.
The layers allow different symmetry types and grid edits to be made in the same file.
I would probably use this app to sketch, doodle and create ideas which I would then take into other software to develop further. Sometimes creating random patterns gives me interesting ideas I might like to explore. The pattern tools may be useful for creating interesting textures for my 3D and 2D work5.
3D sculpting
Nomad Sculpt
Nomad Sculpt is an amazing program for sculpting on the iPad. I was really impressed with how much geometry it could cope with and I paid for the Quad Remesher feature that can be used with this program so I could work with multiresolution like I would in ZBrush.
It is easy to get started with Nomad Sculpt, although I would say that it helps to know the basics of a digital sculpting workflow. I’d also still prefer if it was available for desktop because I’d like to work on a bigger screen with easier access to my files for most of my 3D work and I like to work with multiple programs when doing 3D projects. File size gets rather large on most 3D projects. Hopefully the rumors are true.
It is really cool to be able to sculpt digitally anywhere I like though.
I hope to write more about iPad apps on the blog but I won’t be abandoning my PC any time soon (unless I have to do more DIY).
Thanks for reading
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